On March 27, a little less than a week after last month’s Ugly Beauty was published, alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe died. This wasn’t a surprise — he’d been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for years – but it was a blow to the questing spirit of modern jazz. Blythe was born in Los Angeles, and made his recorded debut on an album by West Coast pianist and composer Horace Tapscott, but he really made his name in New York in the late ’70s. His first two albums, The Grip and Metamorphosis, were two halves of a single concert, released on India Navigation; he then signed with Columbia, for whom he made nine albums between 1978 and 1987. The first four were recently remastered and made available as a two-CD set, and that’s about as perfect a starting point as anyone could hope to find.